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153 “lost” “Lost” Luke 15:1-7 anonymous student preacher This morning, our scripture lesson comes from the gospel of luke where we read the parable of the lost sheep. in this story Jesus teaches a group of tax collectors and sinners about the forgiving nature of god. he uses this illustration of god as a shepherd tending his flock. The story opens with a flock of sheep in a pasture—one hundred sheep to be exact. at some point, one of the sheep becomes separated from the rest of the flock. here is where i have a question (because the scripture doesn’t tell us): how in the world does this sheep get separated from its flock . . . its family . . . its loved ones? how does it become loST? See, i don’t think this separation is as simple as it sounds. This is a serious thing. it involves feelings, pain, sorrow, and fear. how doeS this sheep become lost? This morning, we are going to take a closer look at this parable and try to begin to understand how this sheep became lost, and, by extension , discover how we become lost. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 154 The Scandal of having SomeThing To Say have any of you ever become lost? i mean really and truly loST! The type of being lost where there is a petrifying fear that sets in. i have had, thankfully, only one experience where i have become really and truly lost. Back when i was a young child my family and i went to disneyland in california. all i can remember from this experience is looking up and realizing that my family was nowhere to be seen. all i could see was a sea of strangers. This image is frozen in my mind. in that instant i was struck with such a truly petrifying fear that i couldn’t move, i could not think . . . all i could do is cry. That’s a terrible spot to be in. There were literally hundreds of strangers all around but no sign of my family. i was truly loST. (Perhaps an interesting note to add here is that there is no indication that the lost sheep was by herself. no, she may have been surrounded by hundreds of lost sheep. She has simply become lost from her flock.) i stood there frozen in fear until my father came and took my hand and led me back to my family. now trust me, there are two sides to this story when it comes to explaining how i became lost. one is that i was separated from my family by a crowd or by something that caught my attention and my family walked on ahead. from this perspective, i was left behind by my family. here, my family was careless. They were not concerned with me and they left me behind and that’s how i became lost. (By the way, this is the story i prefer to believe.) for some of our lost folks, they have fallen victim to neglectful churches and sheep. for some, we have worked so busily to build churches, or our lives, that we have left others behind. is this how we become lost? The second opinion, the one my brothers insist is true, is that i saw something cool like donald duck or mickey mouse and i ran away toward whatever it was— away from my family where i got separated. maybe the sheep, that day, was young and naïve and got distracted in some way from the rest of the flock (maybe he found a nice new patch of grass to eat) and got separated. maybe a larger crowd separated the sheep from her family. maybe the flock failed to teach him to follow the shepherd and stay alert. This second way the sheep may have become lost is a far more scary situation. in this case, the sheep, for some reason, makes a decision to leave the flock, to turn away and go at it alone. What could possibly cause someone to make this decision? 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 [3.144.27.148] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 08:13...

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